It was about the most pathetic photo I’ve ever seen. There on the front page of the Nov. 21 morning paper were Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, his lawyers and Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen standing in front of Judge Richard Niehaus.
Everyone looked like there were a million other places they’d rather be than in that courtroom, where the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s plea bargain over sexual abuse cases was being announced.
Pilarczyk was literally and figuratively the smallest man in the shot, a little old man all in black with a white collar and a stern face.
The photo brought a tear to my eye. Which really surprised me.
I’m one of those “recovering Catholics” who’s lost touch with the religion in which he was raised. I gave it up like a bad habit many years ago, and I’ve rarely regretted it since.
I’m not anti-Catholic (most of the time), but I’m hardly pro-Catholic. So why should I care that the Catholic Church in my city entered a “no contest” plea regarding sexual abuse cases from decades gone by?
And yet there in that one photo was the embodiment of all the bad feelings I thought I’d buried long ago.
The questions, confusion, denial and hypocrisy came rushing back.
First I felt for the abuse victims. Like them, I was taught in Catholic grade school that there’s a direct line from God to me that runs through the Pope, the bishops and then the parish priests.
We received Jesus’ body from those priests, confessed our sins to them, begged them for forgiveness and came to learn that, as humans born with Original Sin, we were headed straight to Hell unless they helped us find a path of holiness.
In the unique world of Catholic guilt, we small children were taught that the best we could hope for was to not screw up too badly and about the only way we were going to make it to adulthood was to have a priest on our side.
Like many of the victims, I became an altar boy and, after starting high school, joined a youth organization that tried to make Catholicism hip for the kids. The effect of both of these coming-of-age changes was we learned that the priests were just human beings like us — some were pretty good guys — and that perhaps God wasn’t the almighty ball-buster He was made out to be.
I can’t even imagine what it felt like for that veil of trust and faith and awakening to be shattered by abusive priests. These guys were our only hope, our only way out of Eternal Damnation.
They bred the fear and guilt and shame into us. They taught us that sex before marriage was wrong, that masturbation was wrong, that impure thoughts of any kind were wrong. And not that I remember ever hearing anything about homosexuality, but surely they taught us that having sex with another man was an abomination.
Yet, in some instances, priests preyed on teenage boys right here in Cincinnati — coerced and mind-fucked them into having sexual relations. And the Catholic Church left these boys to sort it all out by themselves.
Church officials protected the deviants, reassigned them to other parishes without telling those parents and altar boys. They avoided dealing with the victims. They scorned the legal authorities.
After many long years, the church’s sins have caught up with it. And Archbishop Pilarczyk stood in front of God and man and Judge Niehaus to face those sins.
After thinking about those sad episodes of abuse and their victims, another feeling started to rise as I looked at the photo — contempt.
The settlement required the church to pay a fine of $10,000 in return for an arrangement in which it neither admitted guilt nor proclaimed innocence. “Mistakes were made” was the best Pilarczyk could offer in explanation, and when the hearing was over he got to go home and resume his normal life.
At that moment in that photo, Pilarczyk could just as easily have been Ken Lay or any other Enron executive trying to cover his ass and protect his assets. The Catholic Church was nothing more than a corporation that hired the best lawyers to wear down the prosecutors until a meaningless “no fault” ruling resulted in a meaningless pittance of a fine.
And that thought might be the hardest thing for me to swallow in all of this. The church I grew up in taught me to take personal responsibility for my actions, not to pawn them off on others. It taught me to admit my sins, ask for forgiveness and serve my penance.
This deal was about nothing more or less than protecting the church’s money and power — a deal put together by lawyers and bureaucrats, not a servant of Jesus Christ, a shepherd of His flock.
God help the Catholic Church. God help us all.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2003.
